Your Kid\'s Not Going Prohttp://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook
Fri, 27 Feb 2015 01:06:00 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.2My Son Announces Where He Is (Or Is Not) Playing College Footballhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/26/my-son-announces-where-he-is-or-is-not-playing-college-football/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/26/my-son-announces-where-he-is-or-is-not-playing-college-football/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 01:06:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook/?p=4336One of the most popular stories on Your Kid’s Not Going Pro in 2014 was the tale of my son, a soon-to-be-senior in high school, getting recruiting letters from small-college, nonscholarship football programs despite the fact he barely played. National Signing Day has come and gone, so perhaps you’re wondering: did my son follow the siren song of the right to be nominally be a college football player, and did I elect to pay for that privilege? Certainly, Augustana College in Illinois would love to know, because school (independent of the football team) keeps sending him another notice that the hard-and-fast deadline for applying and getting scholarships has just been extended for the umpeenth time.

Before I announce my son’s choice, I’d like to share a note I rececently received from someone who had just read a story about my son’s experience as a college football “recruit.” As I noted previously, small schools are using their football programs (and other sports) as a lure to attract students who otherwise wouldn’t consider a school they probably never knew existed. As Augustana put it, instead of watching football, you could play football. I wasn’t so sure. But perhaps I shouldn’t be quick to dismiss this dance as a means to raise revenue, and instead look at it the way Brian Threlkeld — friend of Rob Cushman, up until recently Augustana’s head football coach – as the opportunity it may well be:

I read with interest your account from last year, of attending, with your son, Augustana’s one-day program for prospective students interested in playing football. It caught my eye because the head coach, Rob Cushman, is an old friend of mine. (You may well have heard that Rob resigned in December, after last season.) He was a 5th-year senior cornerback at the University of Puget Sound, then an NCAA Division II power, when I was a freshman, going on 37 year ago. (I keep thinking that arithmetic can’t be right, but the numbers work out the same, each time I check . . . .)

Rob is a great guy. He wasn’t the most outstanding athlete, but he was smart, disciplined, and intensely competitive. He’s also funny, a terrific raconteur, and a real showman. He came to Augustana as an assistant about 7 or 8 years ago, when I was living in Urbana [Ill.] (I moved to State College in 2013, as my wife has a job here). I drove to Decatur [Ill.] to catch a couple Augustana games while Rob was an assistant, and when he took over as head coach I caught a good number of their games in Bloomington [Ill.] and Rock Island [Ill.].

It was intriguing to read about your son’s interest in playing college football, even though he hasn’t (or hadn’t yet, at that point) achieved eye-catching stardom as a high school player. When families now have to pay such outlandish sums of money for a child to attend a private college, it’s fair to ask if it’s worth it, for a son to devote so much effort to playing football, if, as you noted, he may be 10th on the depth chart. (Although with 22 starting positions, it’s likely that most players are at •worst• in 5th or 6th position, even with a 120-man roster.)

Of course, it’s likely the lower rungs of that hierarchy are heavily populated with freshmen and sophomores. I suspect that most players who stick it out through their senior year will probably end up, if not starters, then high on the depth chart, likely seeing a fair amount of playing time as a substitute, and on special teams. In such cases, it’s really an individual student’s call, whether that sort of sacrifice and delayed gratification is worth whatever the perceived rewards may be.

In any event, I hope your son is enjoying his last year of high school, and is starting to sort out his college options, into some order that makes sense to him! The concept of the kind of tryout day-camp that Augustana holds, where high school students can run through drills for a college’s coaches, is part of the contemporary landscape that seems really strange to me. But if that sort of thing helps his ultimate decision, and perhaps can point him to a college with a football program that’s a good match for him, then that’s all to the good.

I’ve been trying to think if my experiences might be illuminating for you guys, in some respect — but I keep being struck by how different the landscape is today! When I matriculated at the U. of Puget Sound, for instances, college costs were maybe a tenth of what they are today. And the means by which high school players at all levels of accomplishment “market” themselves to colleges were positively primitive.

I had not been a starter on my high school team, but my coaches encouraged me to look seriously into playing college football. They knew I was a late developer with respect to strength and coördination, and that I had good tools to work with — a big frame, good speed and agility, a strong work ethic, and healthy aggressiveness on the field. One important thing my head coach told me was that small-college football is the level at which the game is, for the players, the most fun (and I think he was probably right).

Fall of my senior year, I went to an open house at UPS, attending classes, going on a campus tour, and that sort of thing. The football coaches held a presentation for applicants who were interested in playing; they showed some game films, talked about the program, took questions — and that was it. The next spring, I visited campus again, and stopped by the fieldhouse to chat a bit more with the coaches. They basically knew diddly-squat about me, other than that I was tall, and (I suppose) •looked• like I might be athletic; they couldn’t make any promises, but assured me that if I enrolled, I was welcome to walk on.

For me, it worked out well, and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. I started three years (I was an offensive tackle); we had terrific teams, making the D-II playoffs one year (and being in contention the other years); I made friends for life; and I earned Academic All-America recognition as a senior. My experiences turned out better than I could have dreamed. But, ultimately, I think the decision about whether to play in college is irreducibly an individual one, for a student who is serious about getting a good education in college. I hope that, when it comes down to it later this year, you all will feel you’re in a good position to be confident about whatever your son’s decision is.

Best wishes,

Brian

I’d like to thank Brian Threlkeld for allowing me to post his letter. It’s definitely worth thinking about, if your child is passionate about a sport, that maybe riding the bench on the lower rungs of college might be something they would enjoy. At least they’re still part of a team. And you never know where just showing up might lead you — as Augustana makes clear in its facilities, its best-known player, former NFL quarterback Ken Anderson, had to write a letter to the coach asking if could play there, and the coach said he could — as a defensive back.

Alas, my son has elected not to take advantage of that opportunity, even though he has some interest in becoming a coach as well as a high school history teacher. He kids that with Rob Cushman out at Augustana he’s no longer interested. Seriously, though, the college activity that is a must for him is Army ROTC (he’s an officer in his high school Junior ROTC), and Augustana, like a lot of small schools, doesn’t have that program. Instead, my son has decided to go where he started, and ended, his college search: Ohio University. He won’t be playing football, but as an Army ROTC cadet, he could have the chance to fire a cannon after the team scores a touchdown.

This isn’t exactly National Signing Day level, but we did make a video where he announced his decision. The only football involved is that he pulled from his little helmet collection to show his selection.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/26/my-son-announces-where-he-is-or-is-not-playing-college-football/feed/0Rivals.Com May Already Be Too Late To The Tween Athlete-Tracking Gamehttp://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/18/rivals-com-may-already-be-too-late-to-the-tween-athlete-tracking-game/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/18/rivals-com-may-already-be-too-late-to-the-tween-athlete-tracking-game/#commentsWed, 18 Feb 2015 23:41:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook/?p=4333So yesterday we learned that Rivals.com, a college sports recruiting site aimed at fans and coaches, is putting up profiles of sixth-graders, all thanks to a deal with a middle-school “elite” football camp that allows the Yahoo-owned site exclusive access to any information coming out of it. The general reaction in Twitterland to Rivals’ move was shock that a site would be so craven as to feed middle-schoolers into the recruiting-hype sausage machine.

While I pointed out that in basketball this sort of prepubescent prognosticating has been going on for years, Rivals noted that football was just starting to head in this direction. To this point, I should add — a direction that others have led. Rivals.com has to get into the middle-school profile business because there is competition that’s already there, and because figuring out where a hot prospect is going to high school — not college, but high school — is becoming a business in and of itself.

The Los Angeles Times’ excellent preps writer, Eric Sondheimer, tipped me (and his Twitter followers) off to this when he shared a breathless report from a site called Youth1.com regarding where an eighth-grade quarterback would attend high school. Well. not just any eighth-grade quarterback — the that Youth1.com declared was the “Nations (sic) Top Youth Quarterback.” If finding out that Rivals is tracking sixth-graders made you fell ill, then this Youth1.com story will cause actual vomiting, especially if you’re also a grammarian:

JT Daniels, the top quarterback in the Class of 2019, has made his high school choice official. Daniels recently sat down with us here at Yotuh1 and told us that he will continue his four year playing career at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, California. Although the news was just announced officially, Mater Dei is the school Daniels knew he’d end up at.

“Since 5th grade I have been committed to Mater Dei,” said Daniels. “Contrary to popular belief, I have not even considered any other high schools throughout the process.” …

When Daniels eventually visited Coach Rollinson and the Mater Dei Campus, he found there was much more than just football. “As I explored the school, I found it to be a school that was more focused on the academic and community side of life that most other football powerhouses that focus more on football. I feel there is much more to life than just football, and Mater Dei will be the best school to help me on my journey in life.”

Those are strong statements by an 8th grader, as he seems to have the road map of life figured out. As we mentioned yesterday, Daniels will actually be playing at Mater Dei with one of his favorite teammates from this past season.

I hope the high school experience is all that this kid wants, and that he indeed has the road map of life figured out. But, come on, really? Is this good taste to cover a 14-year-old’s high school choice as if he were signing a National Letter of Intent? Is there a fax machine involved here?

However, any moral issues, as usually happens, are swept away by the cash that is to be made, and the competition to make it. For example, in the Youth1.com story I mentioned, there is a quote pulled from a review of this quarterback by another recruiting sit e — Scout.com. Clearly, there is a market for following the exploits and the road maps of life of peach-fuzzed pigskinners. Even such august publications as the Washington Post have written in-depth pieces about an eighth-grader’s high school football choice.

I’d say the blessings of legislators in giving parents more choice for where their children go to school and where they play school sports (for example, they might not have to actually attend the school for which they are playing sports) has helped goose the market for all of this. But I also know that dating back to when I covered prep sports in the early 1990s, there already was a dance between players, parents and coaches over what high school a top athlete would attend. The biggest difference now is that there is an audience beyond the coach’s office for that information. Any site in the business of tracking young athletes just has to hold its nose and go back as far and deep as possible in order to keep its edge and attract an audience.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/18/rivals-com-may-already-be-too-late-to-the-tween-athlete-tracking-game/feed/1Why Rivals.com Started Rating Tween College Football Prospectshttp://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/16/why-rivals-com-started-rating-tweens-college-football-prospects/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/16/why-rivals-com-started-rating-tweens-college-football-prospects/#commentsMon, 16 Feb 2015 23:05:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook/?p=4324I have to admit I was caught unawares like everyone else today when Yahoo-owned Rivals.com, a site devoted to covering and goosing interest in college sports recruiting, posted its first-ever football prospect ratings for sixth-graders.

It’s hard enough to gauge whether a high-school senior can live up to his five-star (out of five) rating — note the annual coverage of how Super Bowls are full of players who were rated, but only as fair-to-middling prospects coming out of high school. It’s ridiculous to expect a rating of a sixth-grader to mean anything, except that a player and his family have officially been sucked into the professionalized maw of big-time recruiting.

Any parent who thinks his ranked sixth-grader is on the way to NFL is a fool, as is any parent who thinks his unranked sixth-grader is not. It’s all about marketing, and if you need proof, I’ll give you the explanation Rivals gave in December 2014, the genesis of how it started ranking tweens.

On Christmas Day, Rivals posted a story about how 11-year NFL veteran Brent Williams — author of such books as “Recruit My Son!” and “Recruit My Kid!” — was starting something called the NextGen All-American Camp Series. Here is its slogan, in its all-caps glory: “EXPOSURE CAMP FOR ELITE MIDDLE SCHOOL FOOTBALL PLAYERS.” Yes, sensing a glut of “exposure” “camps” for “elite” high school football players, NextGen is hitting them younger. (Read George Dohrmann’s “Play Their Hearts Out” for details on how to sell elite exposure to extremely young athletes for fun and profit.)

But Rivals wasn’t just covering news. It was making it — and warning us its sixth-grade rankings were coming. From the bottom of its NextGen story:

Rivals.com has exclusive media rights to the information and data at each camp and the best of the best will get a Rivals.com profile and the exposure that brings with it.

“This is the direction college football is taking us and we have to follow suit in our coverage,” said Rivals.com National Recruiting Director Mike Farrell. “There is no more rarity when it comes to offers in 7th and 8th grade to players like Chris Leak and David Sills. We currently have 25 prospects with major offers in the 2018 class that we know of, and ‘that we know of’ is the key here. With verbal offers, there could be many more and there is no doubt that football recruiting is closing in on basketball recruiting where scouting is done on the 7th and 8th grade level and earlier. I’ve known Brent for a long time now and we’ve have many, many recruiting discussions over the years. He’s a good, honest man and I can’t think of anyone better to begin discovering and educating the young stars of tomorrow.”

I won’t cast aspersions on Brent Williams’ personal motivations. But I will point out that this arrangement is a very beneficial move for both sides. Rivals gets the jump on scouting talent for its audience of desperate college football fans and desperate college football coaches, while NextGen gets to sell its Rivals deal as part of its promise to give players exposure. Certainly, at this point NextGen is noting that it is already inundated with videos from middle-school prospects who want in on its camps.

I may see rating tween-agers as pointless, and it may invite jokes about Rivals.com rating the unborn, but sadly there is a market for this. Fans and coaches want a line as early as possible on prospects for their schools. Whether that’s right or fair for the players themselves, who might not grow up to be the prospects everyone thought they were at age 12, is immaterial. The recruiting maw must be fed, and if you aren’t willing to get into that business, you might as well not get involved with recruiting athletes. As Clark Francis of Hoop Scoop, a pioneer in rating just-out-of-diapers dandies, points out haughtily on his web site:

“Our player rankings range from 5th Year Players all the way down to 6th, 7th, & 8th Graders. It’s a joke how far ahead we are of the competition.”

Trust me, sports parents. If your young athlete is that talented, coaches will find him or her, even if he or she is never rated before bar mitzvah age. Even if your young athlete is not “elite,” coaches might find him or her anyway. Certainly, there are plenty of members of the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks who can tell you that youth ratings are, indeed, overrated.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/16/why-rivals-com-started-rating-tweens-college-football-prospects/feed/0With 29th Straight State Title, Carmel (Ind.) Girls Swim Ties Record Held By Obama’s Schoolhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/14/with-29th-straight-state-title-carmel-ind-girls-swim-ties-record-held-by-obamas-school/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/14/with-29th-straight-state-title-carmel-ind-girls-swim-ties-record-held-by-obamas-school/#commentsSat, 14 Feb 2015 22:35:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook/?p=4321In the 1985-86 school year, when present and past National Public Radio on-air talents Steve Inskeep and myself graduated from Carmel (Ind.) High School, the girls’ swimming team did not win the Indiana High School Athletic Association state title.

With the Greyhounds’ victory in the IHSAA title meet on Valentine’s Day in Indianapolis, the Carmel class of 2015 will celebrate its senior year with a girls’ state swim championship. Just like the classes of 1987-2014 did.

So how do you get to 29 straight titles? David Woods of The Indianapolis Star wrote an excellent piece breaking that down. No doubt, Carmel, being the wealthiest, largest public high school in Indiana, with the best swimming facilities, has a huge head start on the rest of the state. And, as the old saying goes, success breeds success. If you read Woods’ article, you’ll note the number of families who moved their talented swimmers to Carmel from outside the state to help their daughters’ budding careers. But there’s no doubt, too, that the coaches and swimmers are putting in the work to close the deal — not only being good enough to win a state title again, but good enough to be in the middle of the pack among Big Ten women’s swimming teams. Woods’ story can be found here.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/14/with-29th-straight-state-title-carmel-ind-girls-swim-ties-record-held-by-obamas-school/feed/1Jackie Robinson West Scandal: RIP, Little League World Serieshttp://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/11/jackie-robinson-west-scandal-rip-little-league-world-series/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/11/jackie-robinson-west-scandal-rip-little-league-world-series/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 03:04:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook/?p=4319There are many tragedies in Little League International on Feb. 11 stripping Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West of the national title it presumably earned in South Williamsport, Pa., in August 2014, not the least of which is a group of preteen boys going from national celebrities to having to process the fallout of misdeeds by adults.

However, one of the other tragedies, specifically for Little League, is that no longer will America swallow a feel-good storyline and thus supply the organization with off-the-charts ratings to help justify the multimillions of dollars it gets for the rights to air not only the Little League World Series, but also the regional rounds leading up to it. Whether you agree with the decision to take the title from Jackie Robinson West for violating Little League’s rules requiring teams to draw players only from inside its designated borders, it’s tough to argue that a tale such as the plucky, rare all-black baseball team is not going to resonate as it did in 2014. The first, cynical, understandable question will be, “Is this real?”

And that’s a big reason why Little League is going to struggle to attract an audience to its television coverage. That’s a good thing, really. There’s already enough pressure and cheating in youth sports when nothing is at stake. Putting 11- and 12-year-olds on a national stage and exploiting their emotions for fun and profit, all while selling the idea of kids playing a spot as all that is good and pure, is reprehensible. If you want to sell youth baseball as a kids’ game, keep the cameras away. Maybe, the adults, too.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/02/11/jackie-robinson-west-scandal-rip-little-league-world-series/feed/2Should Private School Students Be Allowed On Public School Sports Teams?http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/31/should-private-school-students-be-allowed-on-public-school-sports-teams/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/31/should-private-school-students-be-allowed-on-public-school-sports-teams/#commentsSun, 01 Feb 2015 02:49:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook/?p=4316There is a small movement afoot that doesn’t have a catchy nickname like “Tim Tebow Law,” but it’ll do for private school athletes what it’s done for homeschoolers — allow them to play sports at public schools they don’t attend.

The bill would add the term “private school student activities” to a list of programs in New Mexico statue that receive state funding and would enable students who are attending private school[s] that are not a member of the New Mexico Activities Association to participate in sports and activities at schools governed by the NMAA.

Under the bill, if a nonpublic school — including a homeschool — does not offer a sport, a student would be eligible to participate in the activity at a public school. The public school would be one to which the student would ordinarily be assigned if the student were not enrolled in private school or homeschooled.

Other bills offered the past few years (though not always passed) are similar: private school students who don’t have sports or certain activities offered at their educational institution (being schooled in mom’s kitchen counts as an institution, as it should) get the automatic right to participate in the public school they would be assigned to attend.

My visceral reaction to the private-school bills is similar. You knew the private school didn’t have sports when you signed up your kid, so why is it another school’s responsibility to placate you? (I already know the arguement: we pay taxes. My counter-argument is the same: I pay taxes, too. But that doesn’t mean I get access to everything. For instance, I don’t think the Army will let me drive a tank.) My skeptical self also sees it as a means for private schools, whose enrollment is falling and represents only 10 percent of all elementary and secondary students, to find a way to hang on. After all, if your kid is allowed to play sports at a public school, you can’t eliminate “no sports” as a reason for not enrolling your child at a private school. (I also view the school-voucher movement not about parent choice, but about saving private schools, no matter how educationally dubious.)

But I am willing to overlook my skepticism and say, sure, why not? That’s because the school sports environment has gotten so confusing, in large part thanks to school choice promoting the idea that parents should be able to place their child in any school for any reason, that maybe it’s just time for we curmudgeons, and public school administrators, to wave the white flag and just open the doors to anyone and everyone, as long as they qualify academically under the public school’s rules. For instance, the Farmington News points out that in New Mexico, charter-school and homeschool students can play for their “home” public school team. In that environment, why make an exception for private school students? Also, in many school sports, participation is dropping, so it’s not as if a private-school student is taking the place of a public-school student.

Just let ‘em all play. I give up.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/31/should-private-school-students-be-allowed-on-public-school-sports-teams/feed/7Nevada Bill Would Ban School From State Playoffs — Because It’s Too Goodhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/25/nevada-bill-would-ban-school-from-state-playoffs-because-its-too-good/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/25/nevada-bill-would-ban-school-from-state-playoffs-because-its-too-good/#commentsMon, 26 Jan 2015 03:57:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook/?p=4310Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas is a national-level sports power, particularly in football, so much so that in 2012 the organization overseeing Nevada high school sports considered banning it from the state playoffs. That idea died, but the sentiment behind it hasn’t.

Few followers of Nevada prep sports are neutral when it comes to the Las Vegas-based Catholic school, which has enjoyed unprecedented success on the playing field for the last decade or so.

Detractors claim Bishop Gorman recruits athletes and enjoys an unfair advantage with its state-of-the-art facilities and its many deep-pockets boosters. Supporters say the school has hard-working athletes who are well-coached and provided with opportunities to succeed.

Usually, it’s just rhetoric from both sides. But the Gorman debate reached a new level last month when a state legislator, Assemblyman Harvey Munford, D-Las Vegas, said he planned to introduce what would be essentially a “ban Gorman” bill at the 2015 Nevada Legislature, which convenes Feb. 2.

Gorman’s football team has won six out of the last seven big-school Nevada titles, and it hasn’t lost to a team from the state since 2008. Under coach Tony Sanchez, who just resigned to take the head football coaching job at UNLV, the school has played a national football schedule befitting a college team, and it’s attracted transfers from well beyond Las Vegas — one notable transfer for 2014 was Cordell Broadus, one of the top uncommitted wide receivers in the class of 2015, who moved in from Los Angeles to take advantage of the better competition and coaching. Broadus was notable also because his father is Snoop Dogg, er, Lion. (Broadus isn’t the only celebrity kid. Muhammad Ali’s grandson also plays for Gorman.)

Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, a Republican who also serves as a volunteer assistant for his son’s high school football team, says he doesn’t support banning Gorman from the state playoffs. He told the Reno Gazette-Journal:

“What I want to do, I want to beat Gorman,” Hutchison said after Gov. Brian Sandoval’s State of the State speech. “That’s what I want to do. I want to have the best football team in the country (Gorman) play Palo Verde. And as a coach, I want to get my athletes ready to the point where we can beat ‘em.”

Then Coach Hutch threw down a bold prediction.

“The days of Gorman’s dominance are over,” Coach Hutch said. “We’re going to work our athletes, we are going to prepare them for next season and we are going to beat Gorman.”

I appreciate Hutchison’s competitive streak, and his not coming right out and saying the “ban Gorman” bill one more everybody-gets-a-trophy sign of how we’re making our kids soft. However, his team lost to Gorman 49-0 in 2014, which Gorman followed by a playoff run with final scores of 63-0, 52-7, 56-6, 50-0 and in the championship, 70-28. There’s no question that at least in football, Gorman has established itself as way too good for its Nevada competition. Hutchison is fooling himself, and if he’s lucky, fooling the players he coaches.

Saying it has no chance of persuading the state to allow the school to continue to operate, Prime Prep’s nonprofit board plans to meet Monday night [Jan. 27] to vote to surrender its charter.

The meeting was scheduled ahead of Tuesday morning’s [Jan. 28] final charter revocation hearing for the school, which was co-founded by Pro Football Hall of Famer Deion Sanders.

Although it is facing crushing debt, the school is likely to continue operating for the short term. State officials have said they hope to keep the school open — if it’s financially possible — through the end of the semester, even if its charter is revoked.

The Jan. 28 meeting was to feature Prime Prep’s appeal of its charter revocation, but (from the Dallas Morning News)…

T. Christopher Lewis, board president of Uplift Fort Worth, which holds the Prime Prep charter, said the school’s finances were in “utter chaos.”

“We don’t have the financial resources to defend ourselves in an appeal,” he said. “In order to not waste the time of everyone involved, it was in Uplift’s best interest to give up the charter.”

The law firm preparing the school’s appeal quit this week after Prime Prep failed to pay its bills and stopped communicating with the attorneys, according to legal filings.

Prime Prep is an extreme case, but it’s a cautionary one for any parent in love with the idea of a charter school. While initially pitched as an model that could promote innovative teaching (with none of those pesky union teachers to get in the way) at a lower cost for motivated parents and students, it appears, at least based on an influential Stanford study, that the schools, which are run by private operators though they technically are public schools, are a very mixed bag. In some cases their students are outperforming public school peers on standardized tests, but in many cases they aren’t, and in many cases they’re worse — and costing taxpayers a lot of money in the process, with less accountability than public schools.

Which is to say, the lesson of Prime Prep is that parents can’t get caught up in the term “charter,” and definitely can’t get caught up in celebrity, in picking a school.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/25/say-goodbye-to-deion-sanders-charter-school/feed/2‘Friday Night Tykes’ Grows Kinder As Esquire Network Stakes Ratings On Over-The-Top Youth Sportshttp://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/18/friday-night-tykes-grows-kinder-as-esquire-network-stakes-ratings-on-over-the-top-youth-sports/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/18/friday-night-tykes-grows-kinder-as-esquire-network-stakes-ratings-on-over-the-top-youth-sports/#commentsSun, 18 Jan 2015 22:19:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook/?p=4302The second season of “Friday Night Tykes” kicks off by asking the Big Questions lobbed at it during season one, when its raw depiction of head-smashing football among Texas 9-year-olds put it in the middle of a national discussion on what is best in youth sports, as well as making the show the fledgling Esquire Network’s first (and so far only) breakout hit. A Serious-Voice Narrator intones: “But how hard is too hard? How far is too far? Is youth sports truly about the kids, or is it truly about the parents?”

To this, I’ll add: “How long can we at the Esquire Network ride this pony?”

I ask this not just because of “Friday Night Tykes,” which averaged a reported 400,000 viewers per showing in its first season, or about five to eight times what Esquire Network otherwise would draw on a daily basis. It’s also because on Jan. 20, after its premiere, Esquire Network also is beginning (after a launch online) “The Short Game,” another youth-sports series, based on the 2013 Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel-produced movie about 7- and 8-eight-old golfers at a national championship. It’s tough to tell who’s riding young athletes harder and trying to bask in their success — the coaches in the Texas Youth Football Association or the Esquire Network management. Based on the first two episodes, which were made available for review, I’d go with Esquire Network management, though I’m not sure you can keep the TYFA coaches down for long.

As you might be able to tell by the Serious-Voice Narrator’s questions, everybody who is back on the show (which moves up to 12-and-under from 10-and-under leagues) is coming back with their tail at least a little bit between their legs. While kids launching into each other for head shots seemed OK to coaches during the fall 2013 season (the basis for season one), after that was exposed to the cool light of day, there is a sense among the coaches that maybe they should tone it down a little bit. Twice early in the first show, participants recognized the suspension of coach Charles Chavarria for the spring and fall 2014 season (the latter is the basis for season two) for unbecoming conduct, which didn’t become unbecoming until the cameras arrived. Twice, the show runs a clip of Chavarria ordering a player: “I want you to put it in his helmet! I don’t care if you don’t get up!”

That’s contrasted with Joseph Onofre, Chavarria’s replacement on the San Antonio Junior Broncos noting to parents he’s a graduate of USA Football’s Heads Up safer tackling program, and stating: “I guarantee there will be no screaming, no yelling at the boys… . If they’re having fun, we’re doing our job, and that means more than a championship.” That should draw no protest from the likes of U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and the National Athletic Trainers Association, two particularly notable critics of “Friday Night Tykes” and the conduct portrayed it. After Chavarria’s early entry, he’s disappeared from the rest of the show, though he told me in a phone interview that “Friday Night Tykes” wanted him back for the second season, and it didn’t happen because the two sides couldn’t agree on a contract. (Show producers told me that they didn’t talk to Chavarria because they wanted to focus on what was happening on the field, of which he wasn’t a part.)

Another suspended coach, Marecus Goodloe, is back with his San Antonio Colts. He was suspended for the spring 2014 season for his habit of swearing a streak as blue as the team’s uniforms. Goodloe apologetically states in the season’s first episode early he’s working on “getting better” — as a man, as a father, as a coach and as a Christian. One thought that came to mind as Goodloe was apologizing, as the new Broncos coach was being all feel-good, and TYFA executives were on camera swearing allegiance to improving player safety: everyone pretended the show had nothing to do with any of this. At least, it wasn’t explicitly acknowledged.

But lest you think everyone has learned their lessons, Goodloe’s potty mouth comes back, parents and coaches nearly riot over a game with a controversial ending, and San Antonio Outlaws assistant coach Tony Coley, responding to criticism of all the head-to-head contact in season one, drops this nugget of anti-wisdom: “[M]ainly people who get concussions are the ones who get hit, but that’s another story.” So, as I mentioned, you can’t keep the TYFA coaches down. But everyone is still trying to put their best face forward, and the intentional head-shot ratio is way down from season one.

There is one particularly interesting new thread going through season two: Zoe Robinson, her team’s (and maybe the league’s) only female player, and the biggest player on her team by far. In fact, her size, rather than her gender, is unfolding as her main issue. Her mother signed her up for football to help her lose weight, though she’s also riding her hard from the sideline to take advantage of her bulk and pound the heck out of everybody. We see her struggling to complete three laps around the football field, making the last half-lap with her teammates rushing to run by her side to push her. We also see her reacting negatively to opposing coaches who joke she’s so big she looks like she’s one of the team mothers. Maybe I’ve been figuratively numbed by all the hard hits, but the struggle Zoe has with her size, and how people react to it, feels like the realest, rawest thing about season two.

In season one, the show already made its point that adults can get out of control about youth sports, with kids suffering through the process — though there are enough positive moments to make you understand why anyone signs up and suffers through all the indignities. To me, season two has its moments of interest and is eminently watchable, but it feels not only like the story of kids in a youth football league moving up to the next level, but also the tale of a young network trying to find a way to advance to the next level.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/18/friday-night-tykes-grows-kinder-as-esquire-network-stakes-ratings-on-over-the-top-youth-sports/feed/1Why Is Girls Basketball Participation Declining?http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/17/why-is-girls-basketball-participation-declining/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2015/01/17/why-is-girls-basketball-participation-declining/#commentsSat, 17 Jan 2015 16:48:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/bobcook/?p=4296While searching for outrage over a girls basketball game that ended with a 161-2 score — and the winning coach suspended by his school two games for bad sportsmanship, presumably for running a full-court press defense with his starters in the first half to build a 104-1 lead — I stumbled upon some other articles that caught more of my interest. After all, outragedstories about high school sports routs, and questions about the ethics of the winning coaches, are a semi-regular thing.

Programs that at one time needed to make cuts are now working just to field enough teams to compete. Others are battling just to keep varsity girls basketball alive at their school.

Wayne North has been a fixture around the New Auburn area for many years. A 1985 graduate of New Auburn High School, North has coached varsity girls basketball and football in the district. North took over the girls basketball program from long-time Trojans coach Bill Peterson in 2012. New Auburn went 1-19 in North’s first season during the 2012-13 season before canceling its varsity schedule for the 2013-14 season, citing a lack of experienced players to play at the varsity level. The program instead played a schedule of junior varsity games.

The program canceled its varsity schedule again this season … [despite] [e]nrollment numbers [that] have stayed relatively even for the New Auburn school district over the last decade. In fact, North said the numbers are in line with where they were when he graduated nearly 30 years ago.

At Kiski Area, they are playing “eight ball.” The Cavaliers don’t have a junior varsity team and have only eight total players, and that’s in grades nine through 12. This from a school that is in the state’s largest enrollment classification (AAAA) and won 16 games and made the WPIAL playoffs as recently as three years ago.

Further reporting showed that, yes, many schools are in the same emptying boat. Out of 112 high schools that responded to the Post-Gazette survey, 20 percent said they didn’t have enough players to field a junior varsity team, and none have freshman teams (even though 55 schools have them for boys). The Post-Gazette reported 28 percent of schools saying their teams, grades nine through 12, had a collective roster total of 13 players or fewer. The problem was most acute at smaller schools, but some larger schools were having trouble filling their rosters as well. No wonder my 15-year-old daughter, as a freshman last year, was being recruited out of her gym class for the basketball team after showing some skills. (She declined.)

This is not a trend that happened suddenly. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, girls’ basketball participation peaked in 2003-04, at 457,986. In 2013-14, that number is at 433,344, which actually represents a very slight uptick from 2012-13′s 433,120. Still, girls’ basketball lost its standing as the No. 1 participatory sport for high schools girls in 2008-09, when it was overtaken by the sport that still ranks first, outdoor track and field, according to the NFHS. (Girls’ basketball still has the most schools, 17,754, playing it.) And it may slip to third soon — volleyball, in 2013-14, with 429,634 participants and growing, was only about 4,000 behind girls’ basketball. Even my basketball-mad home state of Indiana isn’t immune: the NFHS reports 8,280 girls players at 402 schools in 2013-14, down froma peak of 10,316 (in only 383 schools) in 2004-05.

Among the reasons coaches and others are throwing out for the decline:

It can be overwhelming to a kid. I really believe kids just get tired of it. Parents force their kid to play AAU in sixth- and seventh-grade, thinking they might be seen by some college.

“They have to go to practice while their friends are just hanging out. … What girl wants to play 12 months a year, unless they are really good players? I think this is more about the kids who aren’t great players, the peripheral kids we’re losing. The kid who just wants to play some and just have some fun, but they don’t want to put in 11 or 12 months.

– Girls being more likely than boys to give up the sports to concentrate on academics or other activities. I’ve seen no studies on this, but I’ve seen many quotes like this (from the Chicago Tribune):

Brian Mays, who works at Colin Powell Middle School and coaches at Rich South High School, said the challenge is keeping those girls in the game when their options broaden. He has lost some players to cheerleading, dance and band, while others have told him they preferred to concentrate on academics.

“I think girls look at it like, ‘I’m going to college anyway. I don’t need basketball,’” he said. “In a sense, they’re smarter than some of the boys. They’re more realistic.”

To this, I would add:

– Girls high school teams, like boys, becoming more like college teams in that they recruit (or merely attract parents and players who want to be part of a successful program), thus creating even more 161-2 blowouts, and thus discouraging participation at schools on the 2 side of the ledger.

If all of these reasons sound familiar, it’s because they’re also why youth participation is dropping in other long-time high school sports staples such as football, baseball, soccer and golf. Even boys basketball isn’t immune. According to the NFHS, boys high school participation peaked in the 2006-07 school year, at 556,269, and as of 2013-14 was down to 541,054. In basketball-mad Indiana, participation also peaked in 2006-07 at 14,240 at 383 schools. In 2013-14, it’s down to 11,124 — at 403 schools. The quickest-growing sport, lacrosse, benefits from being associated with wealth and upward mobility, adding to the argument that economics and a declining middle-class is driving down participation in many sports.